by Lynn Bulock
Ellie wheeled around on the hapless woman. “I don’t have any doubts at all. That is not Nicole. She’s never been that fat, or that pale. And she certainly doesn’t have any bruises like that girl, unless he put them there.” She flashed Hal a purely venomous look.
Crossing the room, she grabbed her remaining daughter by the wrist. “Come on, Paige. We’re going outside where I can call your father. He’ll get this sorted out with some competent medical people.” The last was spit out over her shoulder, glaring while still dragging Paige out the door. Before anyone could respond, Ellie left with Paige in tow.
I looked at Hal and the death investigator, but still didn’t say anything for a moment or two. There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say at this point; I hadn’t seen the body, and wasn’t sure I would have been able to identify Nicole if I had. Hal watched Ellie leave, and then turned toward the morgue employee. “She’s wrong, isn’t she?” His voice sounded soft and sorrowful.
“I’m afraid so. All the information you’ve given the sheriff’s department suggests that the young woman in there is your fiancée, Mr. Harris. Denial is a natural reaction to this kind of crushing news, though. And sometime tomorrow we’ll be able to verify the identity of our victim one way or another when we have Ms. Barnes’s dental records. Until then her mother will probably remain convinced that we don’t have her daughter.”
Hal looked at the floor. “How long will it be before we know how she died?”
“There will be preliminary autopsy reports by late tomorrow. But any toxicology screens will take much longer. It will more than likely be a few days before we have any definite cause of death.”
“Once you identify her you’ll probably want to talk to the two women Nicole went out with Friday night. I know they planned to go to a bar, so don’t be surprised to find alcohol in her system. Probably not much, though. She isn’t wasn’t what anybody would call a drinker.”
“I’ll get that information when we need it, Mr. Harris. But first we need to identify her to everybody’s satisfaction. Then we can come up with a cause of death.”
Hal nodded. “Okay. Thank you, Dr .”
“Halloran. And it’s not doctor, just plain Meg. I’ll call you and Mrs. Barnes both the moment I know something for sure.”
Hal thanked her again and we left, looking for Ellie and Paige. Unless they had somehow called a cab, they couldn’t have gotten very far. Outside it felt damp with fog rolling in from the ocean. Not too far from the SUV we found Nicole’s family. They had gone outside where Ellie was talking loudly into a cell phone, gesturing broadly with her free hand as she paced in the pool of light cast by a parking lot light pole.
“No, of course it isn’t her. It can’t be her. This woman was found nearly naked on the beach, rolled in with the tide. And besides, Paul, it couldn’t have possibly been Nicole.” Her voice dropped lower and she turned away from us. “This girl was bloated and fat.”
There was a long silence after that. Ellie’s shoulders began to shake and finally she choked out a few words. “No. I don’t want to hear any of that. None of your medical talk. It’s too grotesque. Just get up here in the morning and straighten this out, will you?” There was a pause while Ellie kept pacing. “So what if you have a full schedule, this is your daughter we’re talking about.”
The emphasis she put on the “your” instead of the “daughter” made me think. Was this one of those families where the parents had each claimed one of the children for their own? I’d seen that before among friends and acquaintances, and it made for a lot of discord. It was another thing to ask Hal at a quieter time.
After a moment or two more, Ellie flipped her phone closed and turned around, drawing the back of one perfectly manicured hand across her cheek, wiping away tears. “I guess we’re ready to go back to the house now.” She looked pointedly at me and I realized I had the keys to the vehicle and needed to let everybody in.
There was almost nothing said the entire trip back. For a while Hal turned on the radio, but the stations were either droning sports talk or playing music that sounded much too cheery for the current circumstances. After a while he turned it off in disgust, making me wish I’d brought one of my CDs from the car. I had no idea how Ellie would have felt about Christian music at this point, but I certainly could have used some assurance. Instead I concentrated on getting us to Hal’s without incident on the foggy roads.
When we got to the house Ellie and Paige came out of the back seat so fast they could have been jet-propelled. They were at the door to the guesthouse and inside without another word to either of us.
“Well. So much for any family support.” Hal sounded exhausted, and I wondered if he’d really gotten any sleep since yesterday morning.
“Do you want me to stay for a while, or go home? If there’s anything you need help with “
Hal waved me away, the ghost of a smile playing across his face for a moment. “Thanks, Gracie Lee, but I think I’d rather be alone right now. With any luck my parents have gone to bed and slept through any noise we made coming back. They’re old enough that travel wears them out now. That’s why I didn’t dare suggest that Dad drive us to the county hospital.”
I nodded, knowing all too well what he meant. Being in the middle of a generational sandwich had its ups and downs even without a runaway bride. “I hope you’re right. If she’s awake, your mom will be a basket case.”
“I know. But I don’t see any lights on in there, so I’m betting they’re asleep. It’s funny part of me wants the company, but the other part is still grasping at the faint hope that maybe Ellie’s right. It’s so unlikely that I’m not sure I can keep that feeling if I talk about all this too much.”
“I guess it’s a possibility that the person they found wasn’t Nicole.” Not a big one, but I had to admit there was a chance that Nicole was still out there somewhere alive, just another young woman having second thoughts about a wedding.
“We’ll all know for sure tomorrow.” Hal gave a sigh that came from deep in his chest. “I’ll call you then. And this time I promise, I’ll call.”
“Thanks.” Hal watched me get in my car and start the engine before he unlocked his back door and went into the house. Those Southern manners were so deeply ingrained that even under stress like he faced tonight, he still acted the gentleman.
I wish I could have said the same about Ray. Driving home to the apartment had me thinking angry thoughts about the detective. Obviously he had to have known what we just found out. With working the major crimes unit, any unidentified body would be reported to them. He knew Nicole was missing and I didn’t understand why he hadn’t let me know. I almost called him when I got home to tell him what I thought of his silence, but in the end my better judgment won out and I let the man sleep uninterrupted. I’d be just as aggravated tomorrow morning.
Ben looked up from the computer when I came in. “Hey, Mom. Was it “
“Nicole? Your dad thinks so, her mom doesn’t. But the death investigator at the morgue seems to side with your dad. So, yes. I have to say it probably is.”
“Wow. Let me sign off with Cai so we can talk.” He turned back to the screen, typed rapidly and sent a last instant message and shut down the machine. He insisted on making me sit down on the sofa while he made me a cup of chamomile tea and asked questions about what had happened at the morgue.
Having my son be this solicitous of my feelings only one day after he nearly drove me to panic had me close to tears. I imagined for a moment how I’d feel if I had been the one having to identify a child at the morgue tonight. Maybe Ellie’s denial wasn’t so strange, after all. Perhaps in her situation I’d be putting off the worst news, even if I knew it was inevitable, for as long as I could. The hug I gave Ben before we each went to our room that night was tight and clingy. He didn’t object, and I thanked God for that.
*
Sleep didn’t come easily. For a while I wasn’t sure it would come at all. But once I went to slee
p Sunday night I slept for an uninterrupted eight hours, not waking Monday morning even when Buck fed the dogs and did all the morning chores at the kennels outside my bedroom windows. Now that I didn’t help him with that work every morning I didn’t automatically wake up when it was time to do the job. As I had picked up more responsibilities during the last bit of graduate school, I’d let Frankie Collins take over that set of duties.
Frankie, a solidly built thirteen-year-old, needed the male companionship Buck could provide since the death of his father last year, and his family welcomed the money, as well. Due to a host of problems he and his two little sisters were living with an aunt and uncle. School would finish up soon for the Collins kids and I’d probably be seeing more of Frankie around the place during the summer. His uncle’s house was close enough to Dot and Buck’s kennels that he rode his bike over to help most mornings, then had a quick breakfast with the Morgans and headed on to middle school. I realized with a start that he would be in high school in the fall. Everybody’s kids were growing up, not just mine.
Ben wasn’t up yet, but to appease me he’d left his bedroom door open just a bit so that I could see that he was there and asleep. While I made coffee quietly I pondered what to do next with his situation. I still didn’t think that marrying at nineteen was the right thing for him to do. Cai Li was a great kid, but that was the problem; they were both such kids that even another year would probably change their perspective on marriage. Now how could I convince him of that without alienating him?
I didn’t find any answers to my questions staring into my cup of coffee. Even my morning Bible study didn’t give me a definite answer on how to proceed. But by the time I’d finished my study and coffee it was just late enough that I knew Ray would either be getting his morning caffeine fix on the way to work or already be at his desk. Of course that assumed some other emergency hadn’t put him out in the field.
Still, I dialed his cell phone and amazingly he answered instead of it switching directly into his voice mail. That stumped me for a minute because I expected to vent at a recording and here he was in person, sounding terribly alert and cheery.
Later in the day I might have been more tactful, but early morning wasn’t my best time. “Why didn’t you tell me that you’d found a body that was probably Nicole?”
“I didn’t find anything, actually. The call came in to the medical examiner’s office straightaway.” Smooth, I thought. He managed to stay totally truthful without giving any answer to the question.
“You know exactly what I mean. And thanks to not being informed, I got to drive Hal and Nicole’s mother and sister to the county morgue without any warning whatsoever.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Honestly, I didn’t know you had gotten that involved in all this, Gracie. I mean, he’s your ex-husband and all. Why is he turning to you?”
“Because he didn’t have anybody else to turn to except Ben, and he’s way too young to deal with this. That or his parents, and they’re too old. Nicole’s family is in total denial over this and sniping at Hal, and my ex-in-laws just got in late yesterday.”
“Okay, now I’m even more confused. I know you’ve said before that Hal’s parents divorced more than twenty years ago. Aren’t they married to other people, or did you mean that they’re traveling as a group of four?”
Leave it to Ray to pick up on that right away. The question might be a diversionary tactic to make me wander off the main issue, but I felt I should give him an answer. It didn’t make any sense not telling him the truth while I complained about him not telling me what he knew. “It’s complicated. Lillian is widowed, Roger’s in the middle of a divorce and they’re back together again anyway, giving Ben one more example of how not to live your life in a relationship.”
“Yet another reason to stay out of all of this,” Ray said, sounding like the voice of sanity. The man was very close to driving me over the edge. The last thing I wanted right now was a detached voice of reason.
“It is way, way too late for me to stay out of this, as you put it.” I wasn’t even sorry that he could probably hear the anger in my voice. “Once Ben announced his engagement on the same day that Nicole disappeared, that was the end of any chance for me not to be involved.”
“Surely you could handle Ben’s problems without being around your ex-husband so much. I’m not even sure this much contact is healthy. No, scratch that. I know this much contact is unhealthy and I’m upset that you’re involved.”
“Why? And who says your opinion counts in this situation?” Okay, now I was raising my voice on the phone, which was not cool at all. But Ray was pulling the machismo thing, telling me what to do, and I wasn’t having any, thank you very much.
“This isn’t just personal. As a member of the team investigating this incident as long as it remains a suspicious death, I definitely have some say in this. If this turns out to be murder, Gracie, I’d like to point out that the two most likely possibilities for a young woman Nicole’s age are that she was either murdered by someone very close to her like her fiancé or a serial killer got her. In either case poking your nose into this could get you into deep trouble.”
“Statistics can say anything you want them to if you work hard enough at it. And I’m upset that you’d automatically suspect Hal of murder, especially when we don’t even know it was murder yet, much less that the body is definitely Nicole.”
“Do you doubt that the body that washed up on the beach is Nicole Barnes?”
The silence filled the space between us, cold and hard until I finally answered him. “Honestly? Not really.”
“Well, add that to the fact that Nicole’s car was parked in her own driveway when she went missing and it still argues to those two possibilities. Either Hal staged this to look like a disappearance, or someone got to her between the car and her back door without there being signs or sound of a struggle.”
Put that way, stepping away from the personal details and into the facts as Ray probably saw them, I had to admit it looked bad for Hal. “Okay, you have several good points there,” I conceded. “But it’s still too late for me to back out all together. Ben’s pretty shaken up about all of this, and I still haven’t resolved anything with him and Cai Li about marriage. And to do that I need to have some cooperation from his father.”
“Who says you are going to resolve anything? This just might be one of those issues where you don’t get your way, Gracie.”
This conversation was sliding downhill rapidly. “You know what? Forget that I called. I’m sorry that I interrupted your day. Maybe we’ll talk later, as in a few weeks from now.”
The one problem with modern phones as opposed to the old corded kind of my childhood is that now no matter how hard you slam them down they don’t make the same sound, that ghost of a chime indicating finality. That sound used to lend such a serious note to the end of a conversation. Somehow putting a cordless handset in its base or flipping a cell phone closed just doesn’t provide the same release.
Still, it was the best I could do. Ray might be right about Ben, but he wasn’t right about Hal. I just knew that in my heart. And he wasn’t right about me staying away from this investigation, whether or not it turned out to be murder as he hinted might be the case. Chances were good that the body was Nicole, but there was nothing that Ray could tell me that would convince me that Hal had killed his fiancée.
By the time I finished talking to Ray on the phone and hanging up on him, I’d apparently made enough noise to wake up Ben. He emerged from his room wearing ratty pajama pants with sleep in his eyes. It was beyond my comprehension that someone was looking forward to marrying the vision in front of me, but I kept my thoughts to myself there. He wasn’t any more of a morning person than I was, and I had a prejudice against his skinny but fashionable goatee. At least it was trimmed these days and his hair, though a bit long, was neat.
“Sorry if I woke you. I didn’t mean to get that loud.”
He gave me a wry smile.
“Must have been Dad or Detective Fernandez on the phone. They’re the only people I can think of besides me that get you that riled up.”
“The detective. Dad hasn’t called back this morning, which means he hasn’t heard anything yet from the medical examiner.”
“I feel really sorry for him.” Ben stretched and sat down in the living room armchair. “This has to be a horrible thing for him to go through.”
“It may get more horrible. What I was arguing with Fernandez about was his statement that if Nicole has been murdered, your dad is very high on the suspect list.”
Ben shook his head. “Not possible. I don’t even want to talk about that.”
“I know. That’s what I told him, too. But he’s a detective and doesn’t know your dad like we do. And speaking of knowing someone well, it’s time I started getting to know Cai Li’s parents. How about we set something up later today for the moms to get together at least?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “I figured you were going to ask about that soon. Maybe I’d rather talk about Dad and Nicole, after all.”
“Nope, too late for that. If you’re talking about making me somebody’s mother-in-law, it’s time I met her parents. What does her mom do, so I can work around her schedule and mine?”
“She manages a nail salon on the other side of Rancho Conejo. Monday’s usually her day off, so maybe you can get together.” He looked resigned, like someone contemplating the firing squad. “If this is going to happen, might as well get it going.”
I couldn’t agree with him more. Maybe we could all take our minds off the troubles at Hal’s house with something that would move us in a more positive direction. By noon I found myself sitting in Mai Pham’s sunny yellow kitchen drinking tea while we shared stories that our kids would probably rather we didn’t.
EIGHT
Mai Pham gave me an idea of what Cai Li might be like in twenty years, and I liked what I saw. The confident, quick-moving woman who served me tea and insisted on putting a plate of cookies on the table before she sat down gave the air of knowing what she was about.